International organisations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are unimaginable without the media. People around the globe learned about international organisations and their activities largely through the media and images created by journalists, publicists, and filmmakers in texts, sound bites, and pictures. In many cases, the very existence and success of international organisations depended on media attention, communication, and publicity.

This conference explores how international organisations were communicated to the public via the media during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The conference aims to bring together two burgeoning, yet largely unconnected strands of research: the history of international organisations and media history.

The conference takes a deliberately expansive view of both international organisations and media. International organisations involve institutionalised cooperation in both looser and regional as well as highly institutionalised and global forms. This comprises ‘classic’ intergovernmental organisations such as the United Nations, but also the vast array of NGOs and other international fora. Media refers to newspapers, news agencies, radio, and television, but also to film, cinema, and photography.

The conference proposes four related fields of investigation.

(1) International organisations and the media. Publicity and media visibility played a crucial role for intergovernmental as well as nongovernmental international organisations. The League of Nations, the United Nations, or the European Communities devised public information strategies to attract, direct, or avoid media attention. NGOs drew on the powerful potential of media campaigns to promote the causes of international law, human rights, or environmentalism. What role did different international organisations attribute to various types of media? How did they work on their public image by influencing journalists and media coverage? In which circumstances did national governments and international organisations compete or cooperate in their communication to the media?

(2) The media and international organisations. For the media, international organisations represented new sources of information, new journalistic environments, and new topics to cover. How did individual or collective media actors adapt to the new hubs of internationalism in Geneva, New York, or Brussels? How did they position themselves vis-à-vis the morally charged ideas of liberal internationalism, European unity, or human rights, which functioned as raison d’être for many international organisations? How did they navigate between the dynamics of an international environment and national audiences?

(3) Infrastructures and politics of global media. International organisations became fora for debates on the standardization of transnational communication technologies and global norms of journalism and transborder media activities. What kind of technological and journalistic standards did international organisations promote? How did journalists, media companies, and national governments position themselves towards these standards? How did their cultural, social, and economic backgrounds determine their attitudes towards the social functions of the media, the desirability of international norms, or the relationship between governments and the media?

(4) Imagining a ‘global public sphere’ and transnational publics. The ideas of liberal internationalism were closely related to imaginations of a ‘global public sphere’ and a ‘global consciousness’. Similarly, many supporters of European integration came to see a European public sphere as a precondition for a democratic EU. Moreover, international organisations themselves became incubators for transnational publics in which international civil servants, diplomats, journalists, and interest groups debated international organisations’ activities. How did internationalist ideas of the ‘global public sphere’ evolve over time? What were the characteristics, scope, and durability of transnational publics based upon international organisations?

The conference will take place on 10-12 March 2016 at the European University Institute (EUI), Florence, Italy.
Keynotes will be presented by Iris Schröder, (University of Erfurt), Glenda Sluga (University of Sydney).
Travel and accommodation expenses will be covered. We invite researchers of all stages to submit an abstract of 300 words (including name, paper title, institutional affiliation) and a CV to jonas.brendebach@eui.eu, martin.herzer@eui.eu and heidievans@gmail.com by 15 September 2015.